Hi Michael,
Well, we aren't in disagreement. I spoke about the case of "C-x & C-x
C-f .../emacs/lisp/*.el". This opens 250 buffers, all in the same frame.
But that happens without threading as well. Or did you mean “all in their own frames”? That would indeed be terrible.
Since I'm already posting to the list, I just want to raise a point that I have been thinking about as I have been reading this discussion. Personally, I don't see why most (any?) commands needs C-x &. Most of the time, the user wouldn't know that a certain operation is going to take time and therefore needs C-x &. Someone else mentioned on this list that a better solution would be to simply open a new buffer, but letting its contents say “loading…” if it takes too long. The same could be the case for things like Gnus or any other long-running command.
Killing the buffer would kill the process, in case it's hung.
Perhaps I didn't understand the issues that were raised in this thread, but it wasn't clear to me why C-x & would ever be needed (or rather, why its absence would ever be needed).
> It seems as though some of these same questions were being asked back
> in the 60's. :-)
>
> Here's a picture of the display unit for anyone who is curious:
> https://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/RealDSKY.jpg
Nice. Does it run Emacs? :-)
It is a 15-bit machine with 48 kwords of memory. 2 of those kwords were RAM and the rest ROM. The CPU was 2 MHz, with a very cumbersome instruction set.
So yes, I'm pretty sure you could get some incarnation of Emacs running on it. :-)
Regards,
Elias